Music critic Ann Powers’s new Joni Mitchell biography is a bracingly unsentimental appraisal of the revered singer-songwriter whose career spans six decades — and counting.
The singer-songwriter held her own — and then some — at the center of Laurel Canyon’s legendary late ’60s/early ’70s music sceneAdapted and excerpted from “Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell.” © 2024 by Ann Powers. Reprinted with permission of Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
He recalls one such moment in his memoir: “Once, I heard her playing in a gorgeous new configuration. After she was finished and had gone into the kitchen, I picked up her guitar and the notes that cascaded out were like shooting stars; they astounded me. I figured out a couple of ways to play interesting sounds with it, and then I finished ‘Lady of the Island’ using Joni’s special tuning.”
The songs Mitchell wrote then, and the ones the boys wrote back, form an infinite round, with each final chord seeming to echo into the next one’s opening measures. All the romance stuff pales in comparison to what these friends accomplished musically, writing hits that defined the turn of the 1970s on the folk-rock scene.
He replied, or so I hear, with “Our House.” Just as “The Arrangement” argues against old-fashioned house and home, his song, of course, draws things back into the domestic sphere. Musically, it’s Willy reminding everybody in the circle that they all still love the Beatles. Parlor piano for the longhairs, major chords for happy people. Joni wasn’t having any of that, though, so she offered him “Willy,” also on. She bursts his bubble with her melancholy. Their romance was getting rocky.
You might be wondering why I didn’t include “Woodstock” on my playlist. That song deserves its own place in the story of Joni Mitchell’s interactions with her boys. It has long played a central and complicated role in her legend.
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